How to build a team, with Oxford’s 29-year-old head of football operations

Ed Waldron pulls up a slide. It shows: 10,782 minutes which equates to 180 hours which equates to 7½ days. It is how much time he spent on the phone in the summer of 2023. Oh, and there were 6,683 WhatsApp messages.

Waldron is the head of football operations at Oxford United and if that summer was busy then it was nothing compared to this year’s transfer window.

After being promoted via the League One play-offs, Oxford signed 16 players – no Championship club has recruited more – from a long list of 300, some of whom they had compiled 30 scouting reports on and tracked for two years.

Waldron, at 29 the youngest in his role in the Football League, was at the heart of every deal as the relative minnows were determined to give themselves a fighting chance of surviving – and maybe thriving – after 25 years outside the second tier. They are currently ninth, just below the play-off places.

There is another slide. This one shows an inverted triangle and lays out how Oxford recruited their players and built a squad. “It starts very broad and then becomes very targeted and focused,” Waldron explains.

Naturally, much of that information is confidential, but this is how Waldron and his team went about their work along with the manager, Des Buckingham. “If you sleep for a day in the window then you are behind,” Waldron says.

In fact sleep, during a transfer window, is tough. “Probably five, six hours from midnight. The moment you wake up you are on it,” Waldron says. “There are times I am in this training ground at 6.15am because I have woken at 5am. It is consuming and difficult to switch off.

“I would go into a meeting and come out with 120 WhatsApps. How do you stay on top of that? I would literally go through them all as my last job of the day and get it to zero and then wake up and it would start all over again.”

Promotion triggered 16 signings in summer

It is a story of data dashboards, points indexes, and also good old-fashioned scouting and picking up the phone to glean information from a trusted network of contacts.

Waldron did this even ahead of Oxford’s impressive 2-0 win at Wembley over favourites Bolton Wanderers, when the club had to work out what was a realistic budget for the Championship.

He wanted to know what everyone else was spending and found out, calling former managers, directors of football and so on, so he could help pitch for what was needed to compete.

He even laid it out in four columns. “So, it was, ‘if the budget is £xmillion this is where we should be, this is the number of players we need, this is how much per player; if £ymillion, £zmillion’ and so on,” Waldron says and Oxford’s ambitious owners were receptive. The key, then, is to punch above your weight and outperform the budget.

This is Waldron’s second spell at Oxford. He started as an intern, taking a year away from his university studies, before being offered a job as an analyst. There was also a spell in France with Bordeaux, before returning to Oxford.

Whether the club got promoted or not, it was always going to be a big summer. But once promotion was secured, it was even bigger. According to Waldron: “When we looked at the squad we needed two goalkeepers, two right-backs, three midfielders, one or two centre-forwards, three wingers.” He expected at least 13 players to be signed. In the end it was 16.

Twenty criteria for each position on pitch

So what does the inverted triangle show? It starts with what he calls monitoring lists – including such headings as ‘loans’, ‘Championship minutes’, ‘market opportunities’ and ‘bespoke statistical dashboards’, which then filter down into an initial long list of potential signings.

“There are about 20 different criteria per position: goalkeeper, full-back, centre-back, holding midfielder, two types of number eight, attacking midfielder, winger, three types of centre-forward,” Waldron says.

“There is then a dashboard and you can pull down for every position where we will have players who have hit the minutes threshold: 500 pre-Christmas; post-Christmas it is 1,000. We use that at the start.

“When you look at it, it is all data-related but it is a well-rounded view of a player. Not just how many passes he makes. It’s a bit more holistic. That continues to evolve and we have made it bespoke for every position.

“A few years ago data could be misused. Clubs would look at it and say ‘this guy looks good on the data’ and it may have applied to you but also another club who have a completely different style of play.

“It’s about relating it to what you want in that position. We spent a lot of time assessing current players, previous players, players who are at the level we felt were gold standard, to then build a profile from what we want from the position.

“It includes subjective things, things you cannot always quantify. Such as, for a centre-back, communication, positioning. That comes from scouting.”

Transfer supremo plans three windows ahead

There is a points system to score players, which helps flag potential signings. “It’s an index. Other clubs do it, too,” Waldron explains. He is always planning three windows ahead. “Take a centre-back – if they score within certain bands, and there are four bands, with, say, aerial percentage [how many duels they win]. In the top band you get nine points. Across the board you then get a final score.

“Other criteria are tackles and interceptions and possession-adjusted. If you are a centre-back with Southampton last season and you have 70 per cent of the ball, you might have to make three interceptions whereas if you are at Rotherham and you have 20 per cent then you have to make more. So it has to be adjusted.

“And then because we want players to get on the ball there is a pass score that relates to the number of times they receive the ball, retention and forward passes. It gives a more holistic score. It’s about positivity on the ball as we want to be a possession-dominant team but also possession with a purpose.”

This is all part of the next level: ‘early stage scouting’, ‘general statistical analysis and comparisons’ and, crucially, ‘availability and affordability’. Then a shortlist of five to eight options is produced.

“We operate on a priority order from our top pick,” Waldron says. “Certain positions are really competitive such as centre-forward, where we will have more names.

“Then we do our final-day scouting and then assessing character. It’s probably the hardest thing to assess because people behave differently in different environments.”

Watching a player still vital to scouting

Despite the increased use in data there are two traditional non-negotiables. “The eyes and ears for me are still the most important bit; the feel you get from watching a player over a long period of time,” Waldron says. There is also the “final say argument” over who actually decides on a signing. “The problem is when your ego takes over the conversation. When you are a manager or in my role, if you can’t see the other one’s perspective then you are allowing your ego to get in the way,” Waldron says.

“If a manager is telling you adamantly ‘I don’t want this player’ then you don’t sign him. There’s no point. The key is the manager has to be open-minded about it, which Des is.

“There is a bank of work and a bank of accountability that says ‘there are 30 reports on this player’. For example, [midfielder] Idris [El Mizouni], we watched him over a two-year period [at Leyton Orient] and there were 29 reports when I submitted it to [chairman] Grant [Ferguson].”

The character assessments are also vital. They will talk to a team-mate, manager or someone in a similar role to Waldron. It’s part of the report process, but in the end it is about picking up the phone.

This is part of the next phase: their final stages of scouting and character checks and then statistical comparisons, which lead to a decision being made and a deal negotiated and signed.

“Every player we signed we have met either in person or on Zoom,” Waldron explains, describing yet another key aspect. “We will present. The gaffer [Buckingham] is great – the club’s playing philosophy, what he expects from that position, what he wants. I will present on the club’s journey, where we have been. Some players won’t have seen the rise. I will explain about the training ground environment, plans for the new stadium.

“And then we delve and ask a lot of questions and get a feel for the player. Some don’t give much away; some are very open. We do that with every player. The player is learning about the club but we are learning about their personality. With the investment involved, you want to look the player in the eye and get a feel for them.”

Such presentations are important when it comes to taking young players on loan from Premier League clubs. Oxford have signed striker Dane Scarlett, 20, from Tottenham Hotspur, 21-year-old forward Malcolm Ebiowei from Crystal Palace and, on deadline day, centre-half Ben Nelson, 20, from Leicester City.

Waldron explains that he sees Tottenham as a good example. “We pitched to them what our plan for Dane was: this was how we will develop him Monday to Friday, this will be how we are going to play, this is how we will use him and what we see his strengths are, this is how he fits in.

“These players are potentially future England players so they have to get this bit right. We showed last year with [goalkeeper] James Beadle where we took a player [on loan from Brighton] who had played nine senior games at Crewe. But out of those nine games he was outstanding and we did a lot of work on him with the 21s and felt he was perfect for what we were looking for. By January he was in the Championship [with Sheffield Wednesday] and now he has trained with the England senior squad. Some rise, eh?”

Of course, no two deals are the same while there are often several in play at the same time. Planning can undoubtedly help. Signing goalkeeper Jamie Cumming – who was on loan from Chelsea for the second half of last season – felt seamless. Bringing in Siriki Dembele, breaking the club’s transfer record of just under £1 million, from Birmingham City was less easy.

Waldron could sense that things would drag on after the winger had shown up well in pre-season and Birmingham wanted to keep him. “But I just got the feeling it might come up again. Siriki is not a player who wants to sit on the bench in League One. So that’s a deal, you stay on it, you plan if it doesn’t happen – we had other options – and we also had other wingers we had signed. So, it enabled us to hold our nerve and gamble.”

Oxford had brought in Matty Phillips and Przemyslaw Placheta so there was no panic and when Dembele arrived, on Aug 29, it was a welcome bonus. It capped a good window for Oxford. One in which they believe they have given themselves a fighting chance.